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There are some great questions
that have intrigued

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and haunted us
since the dawn of humanity.

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What is out there?

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How did we get here?

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What is the world made of?

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The story of our search
to answer those questions
is the story of science.

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Of all human endeavours,
science has had the greatest impact

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on our lives - on how we see
the world, on how we see ourselves.

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Its ideas, its achievements,
its results are all around us.

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So how did we arrive at
the modern world?

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Well, that is more surprising
and more human than you might think.

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The history of science is often told

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as a series of eureka moments,

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the ultimate triumph
of the rational mind.

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But the truth is that power
and passion,

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rivalry and sheer blind chance have
played equally significant parts.

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In this series,
I'll be offering a different view
of how science happens.

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It's been shaped as much by what's
outside the laboratory as inside.

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Whoa! Whoa!

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This is the story
of how history made science

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and science made history.
And how the ideas that were
generated changed our world.

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It is a tale of power,
proof and passion.

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This time, delving deep
to find order and beauty.

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What is the world made of?

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Appearances deceive.

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Beneath the surface,
our world is stranger
than we can possibly imagine.

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Standing here, it certainly feels as
if I am standing on a solid surface.

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But this is an illusion,
however convincing.

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Nothing is really solid.

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And you and I? Well, we consist
almost entirely of empty space.

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If you took the entire population
of the world, all six billion of us,

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and removed that empty space,
then we could be squeezed into
a cube smaller than that.

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And it gets stranger.

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Mobile phones and other electronic
devices which we rely on.

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Well, they rely on particles that,
by any normal definition,
simply don't exist.

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These insights all come from
our attempts to find out
what the world is made of.

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Over the millennia, our
understanding has moved ever deeper,

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revealing new layers
that make up the material world.

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It may seem like an academic,
esoteric quest.

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It's anything but.

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Every time
we've gone down a layer and achieved
a deeper understanding of matter,

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that knowledge has spawned
new technologies and huge amounts
of wealth and power.

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The first people who systematically
tried to unlock the secrets

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of what the world is made of, and
to alter it, were the alchemists.

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They flourished
in the late Middle Ages,

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working in secret, protecting their
knowledge with codes and ciphers.

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It's easy to dismiss
the alchemists as deluded mystics,

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forever trying
to turn lead into gold.

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Or, perhaps, conmen,

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who used simple chemistry
to impress the gullible.

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But the roots
of a scientific investigation

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of what the world is made of,
lie in their secret laboratories.

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The alchemists' beliefs about matter
were largely based on ideas

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that had come down from the ancient
Greeks, who believed that,

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well, pretty well
everything around you was made up
of earth, fire, air and water.

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Theirs was a system
of beguiling simplicity.

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Everything in the world
was a combination of just
four idealised elements...

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Earth. Water.

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Air. Fire.

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Now, they were completely wrong
in that, but the central principle,
that you can explain a complex world

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by just simple building blocks
or elements, that was important.

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But what really interests
me about the alchemists
is their practical abilities.

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I want to try and repeat
a bizarre experiment,

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performed by one of
the last of the alchemists,
a German called Hennig Brand.

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Brand believed
he was on the brink of
discovering the philosopher's stone,

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a substance that reputedly
turned base metals into gold.

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He thought he could find it
in human urine.

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How long have you had this?
Well, we've not had it...

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Whoa! Jeez, yeah, no, I
got a good waft of that one!

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But it gets worse. Gets worse!

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I suspect Hennig Brand was not
tremendously popular with the girls.

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Having boiled down our starting
material, we will then,

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sort of, reduce it to a solid.

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Finally, we'll distil it and see
if we can get something interesting.

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Let me try and bring you into
the mindset of the alchemists.

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They believed that everything
on Earth was in some way alive -
and that included metals.

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Metals would grow
in the earth like seeds and,

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like the human body decomposing,
they would also decompose.
They would rust.

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But metals could also be improved.

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They could be made better.
They could be purified.

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And if that happened, they became
gold, the purest metal of all.

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It was the legendary
philosopher's stone

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that the alchemists believed could
bring about this transformation.

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Here it is. Here it is. We've been...

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It looks absolutely putrid,
I have to say.

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Well, I can tell you that,
even as a chemist, and I've smelled

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a lot of stuff, this is seriously,
seriously unpleasant. OK.

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So we've boiled down about
half a litre of urine

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to this and you can see that
it's starting to get a bit pasty.

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There's all sort of white solids.

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Oh, God! Oh, God that is bad!

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That is really bad! Oh.

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But what he would have had to do
was to transfer it into this retort.

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So we're going to pour
it in through the top.

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I'm just going to run it down
this glass rod.

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And the next thing presumably
is extreme heat?

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And now, the trial by fire,
if you will.

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It involved great technical skill.

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Controlling temperature, making
the furnace and glass retorts.

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But his strong constitution
and persistence produced
strange results.

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So what had he extracted
from the urine?

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I can show you and, if you look,
we've actually got it stored

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under water, much as Brand
probably would have stored it.

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I think what we should do
is see what happens when it burns.

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Oh! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!

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You can see the plumes of white
smoke. Good Lord! Am I OK to touch?

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You can, in fact, lift it, yes.

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Good Lord. It's beautiful and I
think terrifying at the same time.

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It is phantasmagorical, isn't it?

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I mean it really is unearthly.

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It's magic of the highest order.

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Brand, of course, never found
the philosopher's stone.

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His discovery was named
"Giver of Light", or phosphorous.

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It became rather important.

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It was later used to make the match.

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It's tempting to think of the
alchemists as a bunch of mystics
who made a few lucky discoveries,

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but if you look at the
equipment behind there,
it tells a very different story.

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You have scales, oven, retort -

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equipment you would find
in any modern chemistry lab.

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I have absolutely no doubt that the
quest to understand what the world

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was made of was hugely helped
by the work done down the years
by the alchemists.

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But by Brand's time,
the alchemists were on the wane.

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And the ancient idea of a world
made up of just four forms of
matter was about to be demolished.

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As Europe
moved out of the Middle Ages,
new forces started to shape science.

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Powerful, absolute monarchies
ruled the continent.

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They were hungry for weapons
as they battled for supremacy.

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That led to a strategic interest
in more and better metals.

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The hunger for metals was insatiable
and the dirty business

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of getting metal ores
out from deep underground
became ever more important.

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Mines were one of the places
where challenges to the age-old
beliefs started to emerge.

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Air had long been considered
a single indivisible substance,

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a basic building block of the world.

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But as Europe industrialised,
it became increasingly obvious
that this was far from the truth.

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People realised,
from personal experience,

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that there were
lots of different airs,
with very different properties.

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There was bad air,
which killed men down mines and
mysteriously extinguished candles.

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There was fire damp, which ignited
below ground without warning.

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And the wonderfully-titled
Phlogisticated Air,
produced by combustion.

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All of this raised questions.

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What were these airs?

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How many were there?

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Across Europe, experimenters
went looking for answers.

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In Yorkshire, the challenge
was taken up by the natural
philosopher Joseph Priestley...

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..a man who set out to probe
the hidden mysteries of nature.

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Joseph Priestley
was a precocious youth.

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By the age of four,
he could recite perfectly

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all 107 questions and answers in
the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

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He joined the church, but he also
became a brilliant experimenter.

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He was looking for God, not just in
the Bible, but in the natural world.

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Priestley was among the foremost
air experimenters of the day.

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And it was these new airs or gases
that would help create a new vision
of what the world is made of.

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Priestley set out to study airs
by heating different substances...

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..including an old
alchemist favourite, red calx.

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I love the way the colour changes,
as it's going from a sort of
orange to a very rich red.

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Priestley heated it to a high
temperature and the orange powder
transformed into a shiny metal.

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Mercury.

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And with a new piece of equipment,
the pneumatic trough,
he collected a new air.

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OK, and here it is.

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A precious container full of
mystery gas. Now, to test it.

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Turn it upside down

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and then quickly remove the lid. OK.

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Ready? Lid.

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Ah! And it reinflames...
Gorgeous. Right. ..quite nicely.

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Goes out again and then it burns.

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He described what he'd collected
as "good air".

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And he was enchanted
by its fiery properties.

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It turned out
to be the most important
of the new airs yet discovered.

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In 1774, Priestley went on
a fateful trip to Paris.

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Now, he could never ordinarily have
afforded such a thing, but on this
occasion he went as the guest of a

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British aristocrat and he took with
him knowledge of his new discovery.

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When he arrived in Paris,
Priestley was invited to dine

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with the golden couple
of French experimental science,

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Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.

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They had created the best-equipped
private laboratory in Europe,

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dedicated to
measurement and precision.

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He had a vaulting ambition to define
a new science - of chemistry.

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His contribution to how we
live now is arguably as great
as that of Newton or Darwin.

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When he was a young man, Lavoisier
said, "I am avid for glory".

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And he achieved that,
though at huge personal cost.

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They couldn't have been less alike,
the Paris sophisticate and
the working-class Yorkshire man.

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I imagine that Priestley was
rather overwhelmed by the occasion,

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by the magnificent setting,
the fine wines, by Antoine Lavoisier
and by his brilliant guests.

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As he later wrote to his wife,
"most of the philosophical people
of the city were present".

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And, as evening developed,
the conversation turned
to the subject of airs.

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Priestley soon told them
about his recent discovery,
an air with fiery properties,

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and then he also told them
exactly how to make it.

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Across the table,
Lavoisier listened intently.

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As Priestley later noted,
"everyone round that table
expressed great surprise".

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Armed with Priestley's
knowledge, Lavoisier set off
to repeat the experiment.

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And was soon boasting
of his discovery,

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the same air, but with a new name.

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Lavoisier called it "oxygen".

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It is the gas of life.

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But what Lavoisier did next is,
I think, a defining moment
in the story of science.

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He decided to run
the Priestley experiment in reverse,

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the gas and the shiny metal
recombined to form red calx.

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Now, the really significant bit...

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He found it weighed
exactly the same as before.

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This was to become a fundamental
principle of modern chemistry.

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This was momentous.

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Lavoisier had discovered
that everything balances.

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You can take a substance,
split it down into simple elements

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then recombine those elements and
you get back to where you started.

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For me, this marks the beginning
of a modern understanding of matter,
of how the world is really made.

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The science of chemistry
now emerged.

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Out of connections.

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Between the practical skills
of the alchemists.

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The discovery of new gases.

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And a dedication
to precise measurement.

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The new chemistry
would help create a new vision
of what the world is made of.

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Meanwhile, outside the laboratories
of the rich, science was developing

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a taste for the spectacular,
powered by the new interest in airs.

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We're about to re-enact
a very important moment
in the history of science.

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There should be flames,
shouts, screams and,

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00:20:12,520 --> 00:20:16,400
obviously, this is why we're
all wearing funny costumes.

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In the small French town of Annonay,
descendents of a famous family of
papermakers, the Montgolfiers,

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recreate the time
when an ancient dream of taking
to the skies became a reality.

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It's incredibly hot
and smoky under there.

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The Montgolfier brothers, when they
originally did this experiment,
they had no idea about the theory.

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They were practical men
who wanted to make money and they
thought what was happening to straw,

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producing something called
Montgolfier Gas, which contains
levity, which is what lifts it up.

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And now we're cooking! Whoa!
This is... This is seriously hot.

223
00:21:12,720 --> 00:21:14,280
That was a sight.

224
00:21:14,280 --> 00:21:19,440
It was great fun. We know about
flight, but imagine you had never
seen anything fly like that before.

225
00:21:19,440 --> 00:21:20,920
It would blow your mind.

226
00:21:26,360 --> 00:21:33,040
The first balloon,
made entirely out of paper,
soared a mile into the heavens.

227
00:21:45,960 --> 00:21:49,560
The race was now on
to carry a man into the skies.

228
00:21:55,040 --> 00:21:59,960
And in November 1783, two
brave volunteers took to the air.

229
00:21:59,960 --> 00:22:05,000
The first humans to look down
at the surface of their own planet.

230
00:22:08,840 --> 00:22:13,480
But very soon,
the hot air balloon had a rival,

231
00:22:13,480 --> 00:22:16,200
backed by the scientific
establishment of France.

232
00:22:19,720 --> 00:22:22,640
Just ten days later,
another balloon rose.

233
00:22:22,640 --> 00:22:27,280
This was driven by
a newly-discovered gas,
called inflammable air.

234
00:22:29,240 --> 00:22:36,680
It was 13 times lighter than normal
air and considerably less dangerous
than using a blazing pile of straw.

235
00:22:37,640 --> 00:22:39,960
It had huge lifting power.

236
00:22:44,800 --> 00:22:47,320
This was science as public event.

237
00:22:48,560 --> 00:22:51,440
Half the city of Paris
turned out to watch.

238
00:22:53,240 --> 00:22:58,440
400,000 people,
all staring upwards in amazement.

239
00:23:01,080 --> 00:23:04,200
But its success laid down
a challenge to the chemist.

240
00:23:05,360 --> 00:23:12,280
How could they make enough of
this new gas to fill the skies
with floating aeronauts?

241
00:23:13,800 --> 00:23:18,920
It was a challenge picked up by
the champion of the new chemistry...

242
00:23:20,640 --> 00:23:24,320
..Antoine Lavoisier.

243
00:23:24,320 --> 00:23:31,680
Ever the experimenter, his solution
was daring, to find a way to break
apart a fundamental substance...

244
00:23:31,680 --> 00:23:33,760
Water.

245
00:23:38,880 --> 00:23:40,480
Hi, there. Hi.

246
00:23:40,480 --> 00:23:42,640
Nice to see you again.
Good to see you, Michael.

247
00:23:42,640 --> 00:23:44,560
I love this. I'm very impressed

248
00:23:44,560 --> 00:23:49,480
because I've got a drawing here of
what Lavoisier's original
apparatus looked like

249
00:23:49,480 --> 00:23:52,720
and I think that's
pretty damned close.

250
00:23:55,160 --> 00:23:59,480
This apparatus was constructed
to test Lavoisier's idea

251
00:23:59,480 --> 00:24:04,600
that water could be split
into two very different gases,

252
00:24:04,600 --> 00:24:08,360
oxygen and the new inflammable air.

253
00:24:08,360 --> 00:24:13,520
So what we have is a system
to essentially make rust
in a great hurry. OK.

254
00:24:13,520 --> 00:24:16,440
So we have iron in the centre
and then we have water

255
00:24:16,440 --> 00:24:20,240
which is trickling down,
and by raising the temperature,

256
00:24:20,240 --> 00:24:23,560
what we do is,
we essentially speed up the reaction.

257
00:24:23,560 --> 00:24:27,000
Right, so the oxygen in the water
is going to bind to the iron?

258
00:24:27,000 --> 00:24:31,200
Absolutely. The iron is essentially
the oxygen getter in this system.

259
00:24:33,520 --> 00:24:36,720
If I let a bit of
water in at this end,

260
00:24:36,720 --> 00:24:40,040
that's going to get very hot
and you can see

261
00:24:40,040 --> 00:24:44,440
with trained steam and that's why
we have a bit of pressure behind it.

262
00:24:44,440 --> 00:24:50,640
But it's now going to drain through
and in the centre it should be
reacting with the iron. Right.

263
00:24:50,640 --> 00:24:53,480
We may be able to see bubbles
down the far end. Hurray!

264
00:24:53,480 --> 00:24:56,200
We've got bubbles.
Congratulations. Well done!

265
00:24:56,200 --> 00:24:57,480
I'm very impressed.

266
00:24:57,480 --> 00:25:00,160
And those bubbles cannot be steam.

267
00:25:00,160 --> 00:25:04,480
Right. Because the steam would be
condensed here in the copper coil

268
00:25:04,480 --> 00:25:08,040
and so that must be some,
let's call it non-condensable gas.

269
00:25:08,040 --> 00:25:11,440
But is it inflammable air?

270
00:25:13,440 --> 00:25:15,440
We're getting
anxious now, aren't we?

271
00:25:15,440 --> 00:25:17,520
Well, we're ready.

272
00:25:17,520 --> 00:25:20,640
We're going to put
the splint in there.

273
00:25:20,640 --> 00:25:24,360
And it was definitely
hydrogen and it worked.

274
00:25:24,360 --> 00:25:26,560
It was in fact that pop sound...
Yeah.

275
00:25:26,560 --> 00:25:29,880
..that you do get when hydrogen
ignites. There's no question.

276
00:25:29,880 --> 00:25:33,320
That was inflammable air as it
was called in the 18th century.

277
00:25:37,760 --> 00:25:40,720
Lavoisier's success
encouraged Napoleon

278
00:25:40,720 --> 00:25:46,040
to create a military balloon corps
powered by hydrogen gas.

279
00:25:51,240 --> 00:25:56,440
These two gases that make up water,
hydrogen and oxygen,

280
00:25:56,440 --> 00:25:59,560
were part of Lavoisier's bold
new vision

281
00:25:59,560 --> 00:26:01,720
of what the world is made of...

282
00:26:06,800 --> 00:26:10,760
Elements. 33 in all.

283
00:26:10,760 --> 00:26:14,880
His list included
the newly discovered gases,

284
00:26:14,880 --> 00:26:18,160
but he didn't get it entirely right.

285
00:26:18,160 --> 00:26:21,800
He also included heat and light.

286
00:26:21,800 --> 00:26:27,080
It was a tentative new list of
the building blocks of matter.

287
00:26:39,720 --> 00:26:46,280
Lavoisier's work coincided,
tragically for him, with the
upheaval of the French Revolution.

288
00:26:46,280 --> 00:26:52,280
He made money from collecting taxes.
He was a hated tax farmer.

289
00:26:52,280 --> 00:26:55,440
Lavoisier must have realised
that he was vulnerable.

290
00:26:55,440 --> 00:26:59,760
A member of the revolutionary
government had denounced former
tax farmers like him

291
00:26:59,760 --> 00:27:03,720
as leeches on the people,
but he chose not to flee.

292
00:27:08,320 --> 00:27:12,280
Here in La Place de la Concorde,

293
00:27:12,280 --> 00:27:15,080
Lavoisier was put to death.

294
00:27:15,080 --> 00:27:18,960
This was more
than an individual tragedy.

295
00:27:20,080 --> 00:27:22,840
As one of
Lavoisier's colleagues put it,

296
00:27:22,840 --> 00:27:30,040
it took just an instant to sever his
head and over 100 years would not
suffice to produce another like it.

297
00:27:37,920 --> 00:27:43,000
We have now gone down
a layer in our understanding
of what the world is made of...

298
00:27:44,560 --> 00:27:47,160
To a world of elements.

299
00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:54,200
Each of them considered an
unbreakable building block of matter

300
00:27:54,200 --> 00:27:59,000
and this new understanding
would begin to release great power.

301
00:28:07,280 --> 00:28:12,360
Our journey now moves to the sublime
landscape of the Lake District.

302
00:28:13,880 --> 00:28:20,160
At the end of the 18th Century
this was home to William Wordsworth,
one of the great poets of the day.

303
00:28:28,720 --> 00:28:33,160
Wordsworth was a leading member
of a movement called Romanticism.

304
00:28:33,160 --> 00:28:38,000
They prized feelings and intuition
over cold hard logic.

305
00:28:38,000 --> 00:28:42,240
Romantic science
sounds like a contradiction in terms

306
00:28:42,240 --> 00:28:48,600
but, as we'll discover, the romantic
poets had a surprisingly profound
effect on the story of science.

307
00:28:51,560 --> 00:28:54,680
That might sound unlikely,

308
00:28:54,680 --> 00:28:59,880
but the link can be found here
in Wordsworth's Dove Cottage.

309
00:29:04,720 --> 00:29:10,480
So this is, of course, William
Wordsworth and over here we've got
another of the romantic poets.

310
00:29:10,480 --> 00:29:15,880
This is Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
and Kubla Khan.

311
00:29:15,880 --> 00:29:19,280
But the man I've really come to see
is him,

312
00:29:19,280 --> 00:29:23,120
Humphry Davy,
one of Britain's greatest chemists.

313
00:29:23,120 --> 00:29:25,000
So what's he doing here?

314
00:29:29,640 --> 00:29:35,520
Well, Humphry Davy and the romantic
poets shared an interest in poetry,

315
00:29:35,520 --> 00:29:42,320
in the power of nature and in
a certain mood-altering substance.

316
00:29:42,320 --> 00:29:44,640
LAUGHTER

317
00:29:46,640 --> 00:29:53,120
They called it laughing gas
and Davy generously shared it
with his romantic friends.

318
00:29:57,600 --> 00:30:00,760
But the connections
went much deeper.

319
00:30:07,320 --> 00:30:08,640
Isn't it gorgeous?

320
00:30:08,640 --> 00:30:10,800
You can see why
Davy loved this place

321
00:30:10,800 --> 00:30:13,920
and he shared with the romantic
poets a belief that if only you

322
00:30:13,920 --> 00:30:19,880
could understand the laws of nature
and live in harmony with them, then
the world would be a better place.

323
00:30:21,400 --> 00:30:24,040
Poets and men of science
stood in awe

324
00:30:24,040 --> 00:30:28,280
of the hidden powers
contained within nature.

325
00:30:29,960 --> 00:30:32,400
They just had different ways
of showing it.

326
00:30:36,400 --> 00:30:43,120
And in 1801, Davy's social
connections landed him a post
at the Royal Institution in London.

327
00:30:43,120 --> 00:30:48,120
Here he was able to carry out
research and give public lectures.

328
00:30:49,840 --> 00:30:54,760
His youthful glamour
and taste for the spectacular
made him an immediate success.

329
00:30:56,320 --> 00:30:57,960
Hi, there. You might need that.

330
00:30:57,960 --> 00:30:59,600
Ready to perform, then? Yeah.

331
00:30:59,600 --> 00:31:03,160
Show time!
As I'm sure Humphry Davy once said.

332
00:31:03,160 --> 00:31:10,080
'Dr Peter Wothers is helping
to recreate the extravaganza that
Davy brought here 200 years ago.'

333
00:31:14,680 --> 00:31:18,680
Carefully add a drop.
OK. Can we... Just... Yeah.

334
00:31:23,720 --> 00:31:26,240
APPLAUSE

335
00:31:28,040 --> 00:31:30,480
See what happens to your sheep.

336
00:31:32,680 --> 00:31:36,920
There would have been
an enthusiastic crowd drawn
to these wonderful exhibitions.

337
00:31:36,920 --> 00:31:41,640
Somewhere over there, some ardent
young women drawn by his charisma.

338
00:31:46,040 --> 00:31:52,960
Over there you'd probably have seen
Samuel Coleridge who was drawn,
he said, to collect new metaphors.

339
00:31:52,960 --> 00:31:54,800
AUDIENCE GASPS

340
00:31:54,800 --> 00:32:00,960
And sprinkled throughout the crowd,
a new breed of entrepreneur and
factory owner who had come here

341
00:32:00,960 --> 00:32:03,600
to collect valuable
chemical information.

342
00:32:11,560 --> 00:32:14,960
Humphry Davy had
an instinctive understanding

343
00:32:14,960 --> 00:32:22,360
of how spectacle and showmanship
could be used to establish science
as a powerful force in society,

344
00:32:22,360 --> 00:32:27,360
controlled by a new breed
of experts, men like him.

345
00:32:31,200 --> 00:32:36,320
He thrilled his audience
with his mastery
of one of the wonders of the age...

346
00:32:36,320 --> 00:32:38,120
electricity.

347
00:32:41,520 --> 00:32:43,160
Is this going to be dangerous?

348
00:32:43,160 --> 00:32:46,360
Potentially, yes.
It's very unpleasant material.

349
00:32:46,360 --> 00:32:48,120
OK. I'll button up well, then!

350
00:32:48,120 --> 00:32:52,680
Davy heated an unassuming
white powder called potash

351
00:32:52,680 --> 00:32:56,880
to a molten state and then
passed electricity through it.

352
00:32:56,880 --> 00:33:00,960
And did Davy have any idea
what he was going to get
when he did this experiment?

353
00:33:00,960 --> 00:33:05,840
I don't think he did, no.
He just did it for a laugh.

354
00:33:05,840 --> 00:33:08,160
Electricity broke the potash apart

355
00:33:09,640 --> 00:33:14,640
..to reveal one of
its building blocks.

356
00:33:14,640 --> 00:33:17,400
A new element with a lilac glow.

357
00:33:17,400 --> 00:33:22,000
He called it potassium.

358
00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:26,760
The smoke you can see is actually
potassium that's been formed

359
00:33:26,760 --> 00:33:31,600
but is instantly
reacting with the air.

360
00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:37,040
This element was so volatile,
so reactive,

361
00:33:37,040 --> 00:33:40,800
that it disappeared
almost as soon as it was isolated.

362
00:33:45,200 --> 00:33:47,440
I'll just fish a chunk out.

363
00:33:47,440 --> 00:33:49,800
So this is potassium. How funny.

364
00:33:49,800 --> 00:33:53,680
I've never seen potassium.
It looks like a metal, doesn't it?
It looks like a metal,

365
00:33:53,680 --> 00:33:55,800
but if we cut this
it's a very soft metal.

366
00:33:55,800 --> 00:33:57,880
You can see what potassium
really looks like.

367
00:33:57,880 --> 00:33:59,760
This is pure potassium metal. Right.

368
00:33:59,760 --> 00:34:02,160
And you can see that this
is already reacting

369
00:34:02,160 --> 00:34:03,760
with the oxygen from the air.

370
00:34:03,760 --> 00:34:07,320
So it's really impressive that Davy
was able to do this 200 years ago.

371
00:34:07,320 --> 00:34:11,880
It was quite a remarkable achievement
to isolate this reactive metal.

372
00:34:12,880 --> 00:34:16,360
Davy had a real knack
for finding new elements.

373
00:34:16,360 --> 00:34:19,280
Eight of them
in less than two years.

374
00:34:19,280 --> 00:34:21,880
Oh, God!

375
00:34:23,080 --> 00:34:25,360
There we are.
I was not expecting that.

376
00:34:27,160 --> 00:34:32,760
But the significance of Davy's work
lay in far more than new elements.

377
00:34:32,760 --> 00:34:37,800
It extended to science itself
and to popular culture.

378
00:34:42,520 --> 00:34:49,040
There was the young author,
Mary Shelley, who was inspired
and disturbed by Davy's work.

379
00:34:49,040 --> 00:34:56,320
It influenced her when she wrote
Frankenstein, a novel which created
a powerful and enduring image

380
00:34:56,320 --> 00:35:01,320
of the mad experimenter who is
dabbling in forces
way beyond his control.

381
00:35:01,320 --> 00:35:05,840
And then there was Davy's friend,
the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

382
00:35:05,840 --> 00:35:09,040
Now he actually helped
coin the name "scientist"

383
00:35:09,040 --> 00:35:11,440
to describe what
people like Davy did.

384
00:35:11,440 --> 00:35:14,240
Alternatives included "science man",

385
00:35:14,240 --> 00:35:16,400
but it was "scientist" that stuck.

386
00:35:18,800 --> 00:35:21,760
But others in the audience
had a more practical reaction.

387
00:35:21,760 --> 00:35:25,040
Was chemistry useful?
Was there money in it?

388
00:35:30,560 --> 00:35:35,080
Chemistry was about to become
a power in the world,

389
00:35:35,080 --> 00:35:40,840
but the journey it took to get there
was wonderfully unpredictable.

390
00:35:43,400 --> 00:35:49,400
It starts in the tropics with
a deadly problem that threatened
the empires of the 19th century.

391
00:35:52,720 --> 00:35:58,240
In Jamaica, once a British colony,
I'm hoping to see how they
tried to deal with it.

392
00:35:59,960 --> 00:36:03,600
It's quite early morning.
It's already unbelievably hot.

393
00:36:03,600 --> 00:36:05,720
Yeah, man.
We have a while to go, don't we?

394
00:36:05,720 --> 00:36:07,920
How high are we? Do you know?

395
00:36:07,920 --> 00:36:12,400
Oh, when you reach by Cinchona,
you are 5,002 feet above sea level.

396
00:36:12,400 --> 00:36:15,640
Right. Do you get mosquito up here?

397
00:36:15,640 --> 00:36:18,920
Is it too high? Oh, just a few.

398
00:36:22,640 --> 00:36:27,360
On the upper slopes of
the blue mountains
grows a truly remarkable tree.

399
00:36:29,160 --> 00:36:31,400
I like it here. It's nice.

400
00:36:31,400 --> 00:36:34,000
It's just great to get off.

401
00:36:36,120 --> 00:36:42,640
There are lots of unpleasant
creatures in the tropics but the
deadliest by far is the mosquito.

402
00:36:42,640 --> 00:36:46,240
It has killed more people
than anything else in history.

403
00:36:46,240 --> 00:36:51,040
Now, it carries yellow fever,
Dengue fever, but also malaria.

404
00:36:51,040 --> 00:36:56,360
And in the 19th century,
malaria was a huge problem for
empire builders like the British.

405
00:36:56,360 --> 00:36:58,760
Right. Is it this way?

406
00:36:58,760 --> 00:37:00,440
How big is it? About this high.

407
00:37:00,440 --> 00:37:03,280
OK. And how old is it? This way.

408
00:37:03,280 --> 00:37:08,760
The best defence against
this disease was the bark
of the Cinchona tree.

409
00:37:08,760 --> 00:37:11,800
You know the tree? You ever seen
it before? It's that one there.

410
00:37:11,800 --> 00:37:15,400
Yes. This one here. Right, this
is it. It's starts blooming there.

411
00:37:15,400 --> 00:37:19,240
Yeah, this is probably
the most amazing tree in history.

412
00:37:19,240 --> 00:37:22,720
It has relieved more human
suffering than anything else. Yeah.

413
00:37:22,720 --> 00:37:25,840
Right, and it's the bark
we want, isn't it? Yeah.

414
00:37:25,840 --> 00:37:30,080
I'm told it's fairly horrible.
Have you tried it before?
Yeah, man. Real bitter.

415
00:37:30,080 --> 00:37:34,400
I've seen somebody,
when I was doing medicine,
I saw somebody die of malaria

416
00:37:34,400 --> 00:37:36,840
so I have huge,
huge appreciation for this.

417
00:37:36,840 --> 00:37:39,840
Right, am I going to enjoy it?

418
00:37:39,840 --> 00:37:43,520
Oh, God! Oh, God!

419
00:37:43,520 --> 00:37:45,800
Oh, you were right!

420
00:37:47,320 --> 00:37:51,160
That is really, really bitter. Just
dries up your mouth, doesn't it?

421
00:37:51,160 --> 00:37:54,840
On the grounds that something which
is horrible is doing you good

422
00:37:54,840 --> 00:37:57,560
then this must be
extraordinarily good stuff.

423
00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:04,480
Cinchona plantations were
established all over the tropics.

424
00:38:04,480 --> 00:38:10,400
But every year the empires of
Europe needed hundreds of
tons of the bark to combat malaria.

425
00:38:11,920 --> 00:38:17,160
So governments looked to chemists
to come up with a synthetic
alternative.

426
00:38:20,120 --> 00:38:23,880
In 1820, a couple of French chemists
managed to isolate

427
00:38:23,880 --> 00:38:28,280
the active ingredient in the bark
and they called it quinine.

428
00:38:28,280 --> 00:38:34,160
What people desperately wanted
to do next was obviously produce
an artificial version of quinine.

429
00:38:34,160 --> 00:38:40,280
The problem was nobody had done
anything as complex as that before.

430
00:38:42,800 --> 00:38:49,960
The attempts to do so would
open the world to chemistry
on an industrial scale.

431
00:38:56,040 --> 00:39:02,240
The challenge to make artificial
quinine was taken up in a makeshift
lab in London's East End...

432
00:39:02,240 --> 00:39:07,120
in an attic room
by young William Perkin.

433
00:39:11,160 --> 00:39:16,360
And I like to think he found his
inspiration round the corner,
in his local music hall.

434
00:39:17,680 --> 00:39:20,720
MUSIC: "Boiled Beef And Carrots"

435
00:39:23,600 --> 00:39:25,400
Isn't it magnificent?

436
00:39:25,400 --> 00:39:30,480
Now the theatre and in fact all
of London would have been lit
by gas lights.

437
00:39:30,480 --> 00:39:32,760
And the gas was produced from coal.

438
00:39:32,760 --> 00:39:39,160
Now, one of the rather nasty side
products of that process was a black
viscous substance called coal tar.

439
00:39:39,160 --> 00:39:44,200
A certain Charles Mackintosh
used this stuff and produced
waterproof Macs.

440
00:39:44,200 --> 00:39:49,800
But Perkin was about to make
a discovery which was far,
far more lucrative than that.

441
00:39:52,000 --> 00:39:57,000
The chemicals he used to try and
create quinine are highly toxic.

442
00:39:57,000 --> 00:40:01,080
So I'm going to use substitutes to
show what the process looked like.

443
00:40:01,080 --> 00:40:03,680
Now from coal tar,
other chemists had produced

444
00:40:03,680 --> 00:40:10,160
a substance called aniline which
contains similar amounts of carbon,
hydrogen and nitrogen as quinine.

445
00:40:10,160 --> 00:40:12,760
So this seemed like
a pretty good place to start.

446
00:40:12,760 --> 00:40:17,000
He mixed up his aniline
with sulphuric acid

447
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:19,960
and also a substance called
potassium dichromate

448
00:40:19,960 --> 00:40:22,000
which is a sort of chemical mixer.

449
00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:25,240
And then he left it all
to sort of brew for a while.

450
00:40:25,240 --> 00:40:28,560
What he found was black,
gunky, really quite revolting.

451
00:40:28,560 --> 00:40:32,840
I'm surprised he didn't
chuck it away, but he didn't.

452
00:40:32,840 --> 00:40:37,200
In his laboratory,
at the top of his parents' house,
he distilled, he mixed.

453
00:40:37,200 --> 00:40:41,960
He eventually produced
a very interesting little powder.

454
00:40:43,080 --> 00:40:46,080
He had not discovered
artificial quinine.

455
00:40:48,200 --> 00:40:55,520
He had instead discovered something
which had never been seen before and
which he really wasn't expecting.

456
00:40:55,520 --> 00:40:57,520
He had discovered the colour mauve!

457
00:40:59,240 --> 00:41:06,520
He had created the first great
synthetic dye and made the world
a far more colourful place.

458
00:41:11,600 --> 00:41:17,360
Perkin never did make quinine but
he did create a fashion sensation.

459
00:41:17,360 --> 00:41:21,600
The rich and famous
loved his synthetic mauve.

460
00:41:24,200 --> 00:41:26,040
This is really beautiful.

461
00:41:26,040 --> 00:41:29,400
It's an antique Victorian dress.

462
00:41:29,400 --> 00:41:33,440
Now, Perkin's mauve was more
than simply a fashion statement.

463
00:41:33,440 --> 00:41:36,160
The aniline dyes, which were
used to colour this dress,

464
00:41:36,160 --> 00:41:40,440
were the first to be produced
on a truly industrial scale.

465
00:41:40,440 --> 00:41:47,920
So strange as it may sound, this
dress marks a significant moment
in human history, when the synthetic

466
00:41:47,920 --> 00:41:51,680
took over from the natural
on a truly massive scale.

467
00:41:57,840 --> 00:42:04,080
By the 1870s,
Perkin's factory was making
hundreds of tons of dye a year.

468
00:42:04,080 --> 00:42:09,960
Adding Perkin's green
and Britannia violet to his growing
catalogue of vivid colours.

469
00:42:13,160 --> 00:42:18,800
Perkin is rightly celebrated as
the father of industrial chemistry

470
00:42:18,800 --> 00:42:25,000
but the lead soon passed to Germany
where industrial chemists worked out
how to make ammonia,

471
00:42:26,120 --> 00:42:29,720
which led to artificial fertilisers

472
00:42:29,720 --> 00:42:33,320
which today sustain
the global population.

473
00:42:40,560 --> 00:42:44,480
But the journey that began in the
tropics with the search for quinine

474
00:42:44,480 --> 00:42:50,040
also led here...to the killing
fields of the Great War.

475
00:42:54,680 --> 00:42:58,160
Uniforms were coloured khaki
with artificial dyes.

476
00:43:05,720 --> 00:43:10,040
Explosives were produced by the same
process used to make fertilisers.

477
00:43:13,560 --> 00:43:18,440
It brought us the horrors of
poison gas, chlorine.

478
00:43:18,440 --> 00:43:22,600
A gas used in the dye industry
that Perkin had pioneered.

479
00:43:22,600 --> 00:43:28,480
The First World War has been
described as the "Chemist's War".

480
00:43:35,680 --> 00:43:39,600
Industrial chemistry
became a force in world history,

481
00:43:39,600 --> 00:43:44,000
the result of connections
between the discovery of elements,

482
00:43:45,520 --> 00:43:47,960
the growth of European empires

483
00:43:49,800 --> 00:43:52,120
and the colour mauve.

484
00:43:53,640 --> 00:43:58,480
But the search for what the world
is made of was far from over.

485
00:44:02,200 --> 00:44:05,520
In universities across the world,
researchers had been trying

486
00:44:05,520 --> 00:44:10,240
to make sense of what elements
might themselves be made of.

487
00:44:14,920 --> 00:44:22,640
The main theory was that every
element is made of tiny indivisible
chunks of matter called atoms.

488
00:44:27,160 --> 00:44:33,480
Atoms of different elements
join together to make up everything
you see or touch.

489
00:44:38,160 --> 00:44:42,840
There was just one rather tricky
problem with the idea of the atom -

490
00:44:42,840 --> 00:44:44,480
proof.

491
00:44:48,600 --> 00:44:52,000
Seeing is believing.
Nobody had actually seen an atom.

492
00:44:52,000 --> 00:44:56,560
They're far too small.
Lots of physicists were
sceptical about their existence.

493
00:44:56,560 --> 00:45:00,480
Ernst Mach, who leant his name
to the speed of sound, said,

494
00:45:00,480 --> 00:45:02,880
"They are just things of thought."

495
00:45:02,880 --> 00:45:08,920
The first physical evidence for the
existence of atoms would come from
a gloriously unexpected source.

496
00:45:12,240 --> 00:45:14,880
From the world of the supernatural.

497
00:45:16,400 --> 00:45:21,560
To the modern mind, William Crookes
is a puzzling sort of scientist.

498
00:45:21,560 --> 00:45:29,240
His interests range from discovering
new elements to investigating
the world of spirits and ghosts.

499
00:45:34,560 --> 00:45:38,400
Crookes' interest in spiritualism
was probably triggered by the death

500
00:45:38,400 --> 00:45:41,320
of his younger brother
at a tragically young age.

501
00:45:44,360 --> 00:45:51,200
At the same time, there were
photographs claiming to show
ectoplasm, spirits, apparitions.

502
00:45:55,480 --> 00:46:00,080
Crookes set about a scientific
investigation of these claims.

503
00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:11,320
Crookes invited some
of the leading mediums of the day
to come to his house and be tested

504
00:46:11,320 --> 00:46:13,840
and they passed the test
with flying colours.

505
00:46:13,840 --> 00:46:17,480
He claimed to have seen
acts of levitation,

506
00:46:17,480 --> 00:46:20,880
an accordion playing by itself

507
00:46:20,880 --> 00:46:26,280
and strange phantom figures,
some of which he photographed.

508
00:46:28,680 --> 00:46:31,600
Was Crookes being naive?

509
00:46:31,600 --> 00:46:36,320
Well, it was only decades since
the telegraph had been invented.

510
00:46:36,320 --> 00:46:40,600
If you could communicate across the
world then why not with the dead?

511
00:46:49,400 --> 00:46:52,520
The thing is, even in his own
laboratory, Crookes was coming

512
00:46:52,520 --> 00:46:58,280
across stuff which was very hard
to explain, stuff which was really,
if you like, out of this world.

513
00:46:58,280 --> 00:47:02,760
This thing here
is called a Crookes tube

514
00:47:02,760 --> 00:47:05,920
and it's simply a glass tube out of
which the air has been sucked,

515
00:47:05,920 --> 00:47:08,360
a couple of electrodes
and a fluorescent screen.

516
00:47:11,080 --> 00:47:14,400
He passed a high voltage
across the electrodes...

517
00:47:14,400 --> 00:47:18,000
and the result was
really quite striking.

518
00:47:19,000 --> 00:47:21,560
Isn't that gorgeous?

519
00:47:21,560 --> 00:47:23,160
Looks like a sort of green ray.

520
00:47:26,720 --> 00:47:29,080
Was this a spiritual emanation?

521
00:47:29,080 --> 00:47:32,240
Crookes was a careful experimenter.

522
00:47:32,240 --> 00:47:36,280
He found the glow could be bent
with a magnet,

523
00:47:36,280 --> 00:47:39,440
suggesting the glow
was in some way electrical.

524
00:47:39,440 --> 00:47:41,520
What he did next was very ingenious.

525
00:47:41,520 --> 00:47:43,160
Right.

526
00:47:45,160 --> 00:47:51,120
Crookes made a new tube with another
addition, a tiny metal paddle wheel.

527
00:47:53,040 --> 00:47:55,320
Let's see what happens
when we turn it on.

528
00:47:56,760 --> 00:47:59,320
Ha! Spectacular.

529
00:48:03,560 --> 00:48:08,160
This suggested the strange glow
was made up of moving particles,

530
00:48:08,160 --> 00:48:10,280
something with
a mass to push a wheel.

531
00:48:14,080 --> 00:48:15,640
Now Crookes was thrilled.

532
00:48:15,640 --> 00:48:19,000
As far as he was concerned, this
proved beyond all reasonable doubt

533
00:48:19,000 --> 00:48:23,200
that what was happening was a stream
of particles were making it spin.

534
00:48:23,200 --> 00:48:27,560
He called this force, this stream,
"radiant matter",

535
00:48:27,560 --> 00:48:30,480
and he thought it was a sort of
fourth state of being.

536
00:48:34,320 --> 00:48:36,840
For all his skills
as an experimenter,

537
00:48:36,840 --> 00:48:40,680
Crookes didn't have a convincing
theory of what was happening.

538
00:48:44,640 --> 00:48:50,960
But his curiosity would trigger a
whole sequence of experiments that
would in turn transform physics,

539
00:48:50,960 --> 00:48:58,360
chemistry and also create a whole
new way of looking at this deeply
strange world that we all live in.

540
00:49:04,600 --> 00:49:10,760
Atomic theory
really started to come into focus
here in Cambridge University

541
00:49:12,280 --> 00:49:15,520
in the rather unassuming
Cavendish Laboratory

542
00:49:18,000 --> 00:49:23,480
with the work of the physicist,
Joseph John Thomson, known as JJ.

543
00:49:27,560 --> 00:49:33,200
He realised that what was causing
the tube to glow and the paddle
wheel to spin, were a stream of

544
00:49:33,200 --> 00:49:39,000
tiny charged particles, particles
far, far smaller than even atoms.

545
00:49:42,080 --> 00:49:46,920
He built more accurate and
delicate versions of Crookes' tubes.

546
00:49:49,160 --> 00:49:56,040
Thomson calculated the particles
causing the wheel to move were
1,000 times smaller than an atom.

547
00:49:56,040 --> 00:49:58,120
It caused a sensation.

548
00:50:00,120 --> 00:50:05,600
They were named electrons,
the first sub-atomic
particles to be discovered.

549
00:50:07,480 --> 00:50:14,200
It was an achievement that gained
JJ Thomson the Nobel Prize
for physics in 1906.

550
00:50:17,080 --> 00:50:24,160
A new layer of our understanding
of what the world is made of
opened up in the early 20th century.

551
00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:26,720
The world was made of atoms

552
00:50:26,720 --> 00:50:30,280
and they were made up
of three fundamental particles,

553
00:50:32,440 --> 00:50:36,080
protons and neutrons packed
into a nucleus,

554
00:50:36,080 --> 00:50:39,440
surrounded by electrons
moving in orbits.

555
00:50:46,280 --> 00:50:52,920
A suitably grand location to give
you a sense of the world of the atom
is St Paul's in London.

556
00:50:56,160 --> 00:51:02,640
It's a place where you can
start to picture the scale
and proportions inside the atom.

557
00:51:05,000 --> 00:51:08,160
If you can imagine St Paul's
Cathedral as an atom,

558
00:51:08,160 --> 00:51:11,040
then the nucleus,
which is at the heart of the atom,

559
00:51:11,040 --> 00:51:17,400
and where almost all
the mass resides, would be smaller
than a single grain of sand.

560
00:51:26,840 --> 00:51:29,960
The rest is effectively a void.

561
00:51:32,480 --> 00:51:34,160
It is remarkable.

562
00:51:34,160 --> 00:51:41,600
Everything you think of
as solid matter, the building,
me, you, the floor I'm standing on,

563
00:51:41,600 --> 00:51:46,520
almost all of it is empty space.

564
00:51:51,000 --> 00:51:55,560
That's why, if you took out the
empty space, the entire population

565
00:51:55,560 --> 00:52:00,560
of the world could fit inside
the size of a single sugar cube.

566
00:52:03,840 --> 00:52:11,440
And scientists soon realised
that inside the atom the traditional
laws of physics simply don't apply.

567
00:52:13,320 --> 00:52:19,680
In the early days of atomic theory,
they thought of the atom as being
like a sort of mini solar system.

568
00:52:19,680 --> 00:52:27,080
You've got the nucleus, the sun
at the centre and round it spun
the electrons like mini planets.

569
00:52:27,080 --> 00:52:31,320
Soon, however, they realised that
electrons are nothing like planets.

570
00:52:31,320 --> 00:52:34,680
The electron
is an unbelievably weird beast.

571
00:52:34,680 --> 00:52:36,760
And you simply cannot pin it down.

572
00:52:39,520 --> 00:52:43,120
An electron is never
just in one place.

573
00:52:43,120 --> 00:52:47,680
It flits around as if it were
in many places at the same time.

574
00:52:48,640 --> 00:52:52,000
By the altar,
up there in the dome,

575
00:52:52,000 --> 00:52:54,040
just behind me,

576
00:52:55,120 --> 00:52:56,760
all at the same time.

577
00:52:59,400 --> 00:53:05,520
A new theory was required to explain
this strange sub-atomic world.

578
00:53:05,520 --> 00:53:12,200
The behaviour of electrons
could only be described, not as
certainties, but as probabilities.

579
00:53:13,720 --> 00:53:18,840
Not where electrons are,
but where they are likely to be.

580
00:53:18,840 --> 00:53:21,400
The new theory was known as quantum.

581
00:53:25,680 --> 00:53:28,160
Niels Bohr, the father
of quantum physics,

582
00:53:28,160 --> 00:53:32,280
once said that if you're not
profoundly shocked
when you hear about it

583
00:53:32,280 --> 00:53:34,280
then you haven't understood it.

584
00:53:34,280 --> 00:53:38,720
Even Albert Einstein initially
rejected quantum theory, saying,

585
00:53:38,720 --> 00:53:41,680
"God does not play
dice with the universe."

586
00:53:44,880 --> 00:53:51,840
But quantum theory is nonetheless
the foundation of our modern
technological society.

587
00:53:57,400 --> 00:54:04,280
1945, and the wartime generation
celebrated victory and the
possibility of peace and plenty.

588
00:54:06,200 --> 00:54:10,800
They dreamt of how technology
could make their lives better.

589
00:54:11,920 --> 00:54:16,600
And behind many of these dreams
was the science of the electron.

590
00:54:19,120 --> 00:54:24,800
There was a brand-new world and
what made it possible were these.

591
00:54:24,800 --> 00:54:27,000
Valves.

592
00:54:27,000 --> 00:54:28,960
Now it is rather gorgeous, isn't it?

593
00:54:28,960 --> 00:54:33,200
It's a distant cousin of the Crookes
tube and its job was essentially

594
00:54:33,200 --> 00:54:37,080
to control the flow of electrons,
to amplify or to switch things.

595
00:54:40,040 --> 00:54:43,400
The valve was the workhorse
of the electrical industry.

596
00:54:44,920 --> 00:54:48,960
It was used to amplify
electrical signals in radios

597
00:54:48,960 --> 00:54:53,280
and telephone exchanges,
and to switch binary signals
in early computers.

598
00:54:53,280 --> 00:54:57,520
They were manufactured
by the million.

599
00:54:59,960 --> 00:55:06,120
The trouble is, big, chunky, uses
a lot of power, gets really hot
and is incredibly...

600
00:55:06,120 --> 00:55:08,560
SMASHES
..breakable!

601
00:55:12,440 --> 00:55:17,040
The strange world of quantum theory
was to provide a replacement.

602
00:55:20,800 --> 00:55:25,160
It was in a telephone company
that quantum theory came of age.

603
00:55:28,560 --> 00:55:32,240
Bell Labs wanted a better,
cheaper way of connecting Americans.

604
00:55:34,000 --> 00:55:37,440
To do that,
they needed to replace the valve.

605
00:55:40,640 --> 00:55:44,600
Their research team was led
by William Shockley,

606
00:55:44,600 --> 00:55:48,640
a slick, clever
and rather unlikeable individual.

607
00:55:50,640 --> 00:55:54,520
And this is what Shockley's
team came up with.

608
00:55:54,520 --> 00:55:59,520
It is a curious looking
beast but this is a model
of the world's first transistor.

609
00:55:59,520 --> 00:56:05,480
'You can only make a transistor if
you understand how electrons behave.

610
00:56:05,480 --> 00:56:07,680
'You need quantum theory.'

611
00:56:07,680 --> 00:56:11,600
But essentially it was doing
what a valve does, control
the flow of electrons,

612
00:56:11,600 --> 00:56:15,720
but it did so using the laws
of quantum mechanics.

613
00:56:15,720 --> 00:56:19,680
Now, I would put the transistor
right up there with the ten greatest

614
00:56:19,680 --> 00:56:24,160
inventions of all time, because
it utterly transformed the world.

615
00:56:24,160 --> 00:56:28,720
Big, clunky valve radios
soon gave way

616
00:56:28,720 --> 00:56:36,360
to small portable transistor radios,
and these in turn were replaced
by the micro-processer.

617
00:56:36,360 --> 00:56:43,280
It is astonishing when you think
that in just 60 years we have gone
from this,

618
00:56:43,280 --> 00:56:51,000
a single transistor, to this,
a micro-processor that contains
over two billion transistors.

619
00:56:58,600 --> 00:57:02,440
For me, the micro-processor
is the ultimate expression

620
00:57:02,440 --> 00:57:07,760
of the power that has been unleashed
by trying to understand
what the world is made of.

621
00:57:13,920 --> 00:57:18,640
Delving ever deeper into matter
has undoubtedly changed our society.

622
00:57:18,640 --> 00:57:23,480
The buildings we live in, the way
we travel, how we communicate.

623
00:57:23,480 --> 00:57:30,240
In short, our modern way of life is
largely a product of the attempts
to find out what we're all made of.

624
00:57:32,040 --> 00:57:34,720
Our attempts are far from over.

625
00:57:34,720 --> 00:57:38,880
There will be new layers
to discover, ever more strange.

626
00:57:38,880 --> 00:57:45,720
Perhaps what now seems unbelievable
is simply what we do not yet
understand.

627
00:58:06,400 --> 00:58:10,960
Next time, the most
personal question we have asked.

628
00:58:10,960 --> 00:58:13,040
How did we get here?

629
00:58:36,360 --> 00:58:39,400
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

630
00:58:39,400 --> 00:58:42,440
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk